AMD has officially announced its CES 2025 event, which promises to bring the “next generation of innovation across gaming.” The event is set to be held Monday, January 6 at 11 am PT (2 pm ET/7 pm GMT) and will be live-streamed.
The company is expected to unveil its next-gen gaming GPU lineup, based on the RDNA 4 architecture. While AMD has been lagging behind Nvidia in terms of being the best graphics card available, it’s hoped that AMD will at least be able to offer some decent competition in the mid-range GPU market. The company is also expected to unveil its new AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D CPU at the event, and possibly its new Ryzen Z2 Extreme chip for handhelds.
In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Jack Huynh, senior vice president and general manager of computing and graphics at AMD, also mentioned “AI PC” in the announcement. This could refer to some of next year’s chips, which are codenamed AMD Strix Halo, boasting superior artificial intelligence performance with the neural processor unit (NPU) onboard.
However, on the gaming front, these chips are also reported to have a massive integrated GPU (iGPU). A leak back in November indicated that AMD plans to equip the “Radeon 8000S” GPU with the upgraded RDNA 3.5 architecture and up to 40 compute units.
For comparison, the Radeon 890M, the headlining iGPU in the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, has 16 compute units, while the iGPU found in hardware running the 7840U or Z1 Extreme has just 12.
The company is also expected to lift the lid on its new RDNA 4 graphics cards. The rumored new AMD Radeon RX 8800 XT is said to be 45% faster in terms of ray tracing over the last generation, and allegedly matches Nvidia’s RTX 4080 in certain specs.
Last year AMD went all in on AI at CES, showing off the Ryzen 8000G chips and 8040 mobile chips. These all came with NPUs, and this is likely to be a continued focus for AMD.
While last year’s AMD CES announcements weren’t particularly gaming-centric, with next-generation hardware in the wings, it could be a more exciting CES for PC gamers this year.
Valve has said that it is waiting for a proper generational leap before considering a successor to the current best gaming handheld, the Steam Deck. CES 2025 could be the first time we get a proper glimpse at that type of hardware, as well as its new GPUs.